


the rotting men

by soliloquium



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: 50s era germany, M/M, Period Typical Homophobia Mentioned, aph prussia being a vague bastard, bc i love my love craftian horror, i think i would call this a romance tinged tragedy, its 4 am ladssss, or is that pretentious, this is kinda a grim piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:28:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29030184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soliloquium/pseuds/soliloquium
Summary: If you whisper I love you and he pretends not to hear, did it happen?//When a broken boy finds another broken boy in the streets of Berlin and takes him home.Sadly, they're a lot less alike than they want to be.
Relationships: Prussia (Hetalia)/Reader
Kudos: 6





	the rotting men

**Author's Note:**

> Title inspired by the word gammler, a prevalent subculture in Germany within the 60s

You find him under a bench in Berlin, more skeleton than man.  
  
It is 1955. It is winter. It is the post war era.  
  
Behind every dingy, squalid corridor you're bound to find a hundred of them, the left over almost-corpses that god just wasn't kind enough to kill. Haunted by a memory of a Germany that just doesn't exist anymore with charcoal padded under their eyes, limbs trebling from one two many needles.  
  
You're sure that if you pulled that ratty, dark blue coat sleeve you'd find his similarly pockmarked with cowardice. Still, something draws you in closer, a shiver, something about him seems heavier, denser, like his very body extends with gravity. A planetary mass.  
  
His neck snaps up in a lightening motion and he smiles, his mouth a crooked line that resembled a mountain you swear you've seen in the horizon, somewhere in the east. Beggars aren't allowed to be this beautiful. You shudder.  
  
And you take him home.  
  
To your surprise, his skin is deceptively smooth. Like untouched snow after a blizzard- and you search him thoroughly, almost desperately, during your intimate moments, for some sort of mark, some sort of human imperfection. He allows you, absently, as if he’s been through this before, and strokes your hair as his mind wanders into places you know you will never reach.  
  
But that comes after, first, you seat him on the rim of your bathtub. He is listless, almost bored, as you wipe the river of blood off his shoulder. There’s no entrance wound, exit wound, no highway crossing where it could come from and after 20 minutes of frantic scrubbing, his hand grips yours. “It’s not mine,” he tells you gently, with that same crocked smile, eyes a circle of glowing blue like the hottest kind of fire, and you pretend not to notice as a very, very fresh red droplet runs down your porcelain bathtub and streaks red onto the tile.  
  
There’s not enough of him and there’s too much.  
  
After a week, his presence on the couch, skeleton hands gripping a book or remote seems commonplace. His place at your dinner table, the second pair of shoes thrown carelessly next to your orderly ones. The permanent, watery brown stain on your granite countertop where he'd spilled tea and that neither of you bothered to clean up.  
  
He is an indelible and yet insignificant mark.  
  
Most days, it's nice, quaint, the gentle buzz from the television every time you come back home, his coarse laugh punctuating a mediocre sitcom joke, the way he threatens bodily violence on inanimate objects for refusing to bend to his will.  
  
Other times, he is something just north of uncanny valley. He is wearing human skin. Sometimes, at night, he doesn't seem to be breathing and every few weeks, for a second at a time, you'd swear his eyes flashed a macabre red.  
  
Two months in and he still doesn’t have his own clothes. Doesn’t have his own closet. You offer to take him shopping, to empty out another shelf but he only shakes his head gently, pityingly, “I don’t own things.”  
  
You’re not sure if he’s crazy or if he’s one of those communist philosophy types. You’re not sure if you’d care if he was.  
  
You press your lips together. Don’t say anything about how his old clothes seemed to have vanished from the laundry altogether.  
  
Three months in and you don’t know his last name. You ask once, casually, assuming that a man abandoned to the snow wouldn’t care much for family anyways. (You can relate, your strict, catholic mother and even stricter pastor father are tucked far away somewhere in a mountain village in Saarland. Out of sight and out of mind.)  
  
But he says nothing, or smiles in that whimsically gentle way of his, or stares blankly as if he isn’t sure what a last name is. Sometimes he carefully grasps your hands and kisses you as a distraction and in those moments you’re sure you could live without knowing.  
  
Sometimes, you see his gaze catch on the window and you know he is somewhere else. Doesn’t feel like he was ever here in the first place, a ghost boy that floats around your apartment and gives you frigid smiles in place of actual conversation.  
  
Once, he lays awake in bed with you and asks if you will remember him on your deathbed with an earnest that makes you want to climb out of bed and vomit. His eyes flash blood and pin you to the bed. Yes, you say, without really understanding why, yes even when you are gone I will remember you always even in the smallest things even when there is nothing more to remember.  
  
His eyes go back to blue and you drift off into dreams about an achingly vast field with no horizon and crooked mountains shaped like a smile  
  
All at once you are disastrously, cripplingly in love. Falling from a cliff.  
  
You try every method in the book to ground him. You bring him flowers in the middle of winter, you buy him books, watches, a cell phone, wine, chocolates, a car. You clean up your act, work out, pen him love letters in the candle light when you think he’s sleeping, insist on cooking the food you think he likes. You drive her to parks. A cottage by the sea, take him to every pretty place in Germany that might even slightly interest him. Cologne, Dresden, Munich, Heidelberg, Watzmann, Brocken. You  
  
He dismissed every material gift with an apologetic shake of the head, almost disappointed you don’t understand. His fingers wrap around your wrist and you can feel the cold from his skin drip into yours as he pulls you close, whispering gently, a reminder, “I do not own things.” And I cannot be owned, without saying.  
  
The places, however, slaps him out of despondency. He puts a hand to an oak tree in a park in Heidelberg and tells you, absently, his voice drenched in memories, “Someone I loved is buried here.”  
  
He sees things you do not. He stares at abandoned buildings with a remorse and vindication you do not understand. There is a tragedy under the bridges, in every lake, that he seems intimate with.  
  
In cologne, he strikes a match and lights up a car at 9:43 pm.  
  
The pretentious, red thing goes up in smoke a carcass of metal and charred leather seats. He is seething with rage and you don’t touch him because you know he’d burn you if you did but you watch. In rapture and fear.  
  
He seems to consider doing the same to the house, but doesn’t. It feels empty, the motion, like the brace before firing a gun. Except there’s no bullets.  
  
You watch as the dancing flames reflect on his face, still perfect as soot begins to gather like dark butterflies.  
  
“Why?” You ask, sacrilegiously. Breaking the silence of that distinctly consecrated night. Even the stars seem to be holding their breath.  
  
“Personal despair could never be desperate enough," he tells you, watching as the smoke gathered and swirled off into the open night sky. A translation of pain, “When tragedy happens, it needs to pass down the line, like a disease. There is an innate sin in the blood of some people.”  
  
Like most things, this escapes your comprehension entirely, and all you can focus on, even when the police sirens start blaring, is how beautifully the red reflects off his irises.  
  
He gives you a wayward grin. Like he’s done this before- and he has, you know he had- as he grasps your hand with a grip that for once feels real and solid as he darts the other way, dragging you along behind him in this mad dash. He laughs, the sound beautiful and loud and perfect, like church bells or sermon. Something holy, pure.  
  
You’re just sane enough to stop your ethereal, cackling lover from veering into oncoming traffic.  
  
He looks at you were a eerie intensity that makes you stammer an apology, an apology that he quickly cuts off as he pushes you against exposed brick and crushes his lips to yours. Your tongue flooding with the taste of him, a musky wilderness.  
  
There’s a sigh, somewhere, and even though you’ve had sex this feels like the most heart trending thing you’ve ever done in your life. You tremble. Your arms slip around his waist, pulling him closer, as if forevermore. As if drinking god.  
  
It’s enough to make you forget that it’s the 50s and that you’re both boys and that if any police officer caught the way his fingers were tenderly, tenderly brushing against your cheek, both of you would be carted off to jail for a decade but you don't care, really you don't, for the first time you feel as if you know him. Gilbert. Your Gilbert.  
  


* * *

  
  
When the story ends, you're on the floor and the coolness of his skin seems to finally have crawled inside you, making a home amongst your other fragile, human organs.  
  
He stands above you with his red eyes, disappointed but not surprised. He mumbled something about this before, in the beginning, about what it would be like once you knew, what the pain would feel like.  
  
A sigh from him and you know without looking that all the stars outside the glass have blinked out, that every single other person in the apartment besides you and Him have gone still, paused or maybe dead. Maybe it was the whole street, the country, a few million bodies and still, how can it said to have mattered?  
  
"Ignorance isn't safety," He quietly tells your quaking form, in some something that could've been kindness, "Tell me, how many poor weeds have you stepped on, unthinkingly, in your lifetime?"  
  
The clock doesn't tick but you can feel the universe moving, entropy. You can feel the vastness of it, remember those dreams with out any horizons in sight and the knowledge weighs down on you like a million bowling balls.  
  
"You promised to remember me," He reminds you, his voice still quiet but brimming with an emotion that hasn't quiet come to a boil, "We had more than this."  
  
All of Germany shifts slightly, as if moving in its sleep, and the stars blink back, your breath releases.  
  
"If I've hurt you," he begins, but shakes his head, stumbling over words that he knows you won't ever really understand, won't forgive him if he lets you know.  
  
Resignation, tinged: resentment, "You'll go on living just fine."  
  
You look up at him once, I love you, your look says, but he does not look back. The door closes. There are no footsteps down the hall.

**Author's Note:**

> sequel/prequel to come!


End file.
